MENU

Interview in Mandarin with TV presenter and Chinese teacher Yangyang

Interview in Mandarin with TV presenter and Chinese teacher Yangyang

by Benny Lewis

Time for another video in Chinese! This is actually part of the summer project of improving many languages, and as such it is the first in a series of many interviews with natives of the languages in my list of 10.

Yang Yang works as the Mandarin speaking presenter for the TV show “Hello Hollywood”, speaks on YoyoChinese lessons (a paid membership site where she teaches beginner Chinese), and also does her own videos on her Youtube channel. We had a couple of chats on Skype and she helped me with some problems I was having, and was happy to record our last conversation.

In this video we talked about how she got into working as a TV presenter, her thoughts on learning Mandarin, a quick cultural comparison of America (which I’m back in right now), how she trained Eliza Coupe to sound like a Chinese speaking expat in just two weeks, and more – the whole video is almost 20 minutes long. Don’t forget to activate the subtitles in English (or traditional/simplified Chinese).

There were a few sound synchronisation and other technical issues (this was my first recorded video Skype call), my camera died at the end, and I had to have Yangyang help me record her stream, but I think it worked out watchable and I’ll be sure to improve on it for the next video! Yangyang is certainly no stranger to such interviews so she was great to keep the conversation flowing.

Of course, this video is not a huge change in my level over the last month as I’ve not been learning Chinese as intensively (most of my work in June was on characters; more on that soon) and still have plenty of mistakes and had to glance at my notes on occasion, but the point was that rather than another interview of someone asking me about my story (which most of you know inside and out by now), I thought it was way more interesting to share other people’s stories using my languages, and that’s the style I’ll be going for in other upcoming videos too!

Hopefully future videos will be with people as interesting and fun to talk to as Yangyang! Thanks for watching 🙂